Second class politics

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” is surely one of the best-known political quotations in the world. It was written in 1848 by a then thirty year old Karl Marx as part of the manifesto of the communist party – a political party that did not then exist.

Ever since they were penned, Marx’s words have inspired, infuriated and, all too often, confused people engaged in all manner of political projects right across the ideological spectrum. As journalist Mick Hume wrote, this line in the Communist Manifesto does not mean Marx thought history was one long miners’ strike. (1) Instead it means that the history of human society can be understood as a series of developments, often outright ruptures from the past, in which economics is the primary motivator. Over time, more and more people have been lifted out of penury – the age of industry ushered in by the bourgeoisie was every bit as revolutionary as events in Russia in 1917. Marx just wanted to see the job done properly and argued capitalism, while an improvement over the feudalism of kings and serfs, was incapable of properly distributing the fruit of labour.

Of course, many contemporary socialists seem to have missed this, fairly basic, point and instead think socialism is merely about slapping it into the rich. While there is a certain pleasure to be had from populist cries to ‘soak the fat boys’, have you ever noticed that these clarion calls never come to anything?

It is one thing to be presented with deformed ‘Marxoidism’ from the opponents of socialism but, sadly, it is all too common that those who profess to be on the left know precious little about the entire concept of class conflict, mistaking it for a kind of grubby sectarian squabble in which flat-capped workers riot against diamond-eating plutocrats and their sneering middle-class allies.

Perhaps this is to be expected today: having just come through through the longest downturn in class politics since the nineteenth century it’s no surprise that the reawakening of class consciousness is not only uneven, but also confused, contradictory and inchoate. Of course, top-down class warfare never really went away. In fact, the past two decades have arguably seen an intensification of attacks on the working class as a political entity – which is strange, because ‘the working class’ as a political subject barely exists today, its leaders having slit its throat through bad theory and even worse politics.

And yet, here we are, in the middle of a recession and something is indeed stirring.

The Daily Mail reported last week that the British Labour party leader Gordon Brown plans on besting the Conservatives by launching a “class war”. (2) The Mail’s faux middle-class outrage aside, this is a rather strange development. Why, now, would Labour decide to indulge in a spate of political cross-dressing? Also, how on earth can a party that has been in government for twelve years cast itself in the role of radical opposition?

Of course it transpires that, rather than encouraging the self-organisation of workers, the fat controller’s idea of class war is not much more than pointing out that prominent Tories tend to be the privately educated scions of the wealthy. Who knew?

Suddenly the British government is beginning to sound like veteran cartoon anarchist Ian Bone who lambasts the likes of Tory leader David Cameron as ‘Lord Snooty’. (3) At least the (genuinely funny) Bone means it, though.

That well-known organ of the working class, the Guardian, has chimed-in, celebrating the orgy of toff-bashing. Peter Lazenby writes: “There’s a lot of people who might be glad to see a Labour government taking a more traditional stance on the class divide in Britain.” (4) Indeed so but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you, Peter. There is also an awful lot of people awaiting the second coming of Jesus.

(Apart from overestimating the socialism of Labour, Lazenby seems to have too charitable a view of Guardian-readers, the artichoke heart and organic soul of the now disgraced New Labour project.)

Anyone who has any experience of the British Labour party in government will know all too well that it has nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with managing misery.

The high water mark of Labour’s ‘social-ism’ was the corporatist 1945 government of Clement Atlee. Not only has it all been downhill since then, it’s also blindingly obvious, at least to anyone that cares, that Labour’s obsession with state intervention masked a failure to believe that the working class was capable of leading genuine, democratic change. New Labour’s much-maligned ‘control-freakery’ is nothing new – the only difference is that the Labour party of old confined itself to marshalling the stage army of the working class. Blair and Brown’s innovation was merely to have the state insinuate its way into the lives of people who were hitherto able to use their wealth to insulate themselves from the government. (5) Atlee’s administration did create the National Health Service (against the will of the medical profession) and the safety net of social welfare, but these were done in spite of Labour’s politics, not because of it.

Even Labour’s tawdry old ‘socialism of scarcity’ was excised from the party following its humiliating defeat in the 1982 general election. The destruction of the Labour left created a void which was quickly filled not by right-leaning Labour bureaucrats, but by Neil Kinnock and his coterie of young Marxism Today-reading supporters – including Mssrs. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair and his friend and confidant James Gordon Brown. These filofax-brandishing post-Marxists quickly dispensed with the core idea of socialism – that the working class was the universal class in whose self-interest was the liberation of humanity from toil and alienation – and replaced it with a patrician concern for ‘the poor’. (6)

Suddenly, though, when faced with a likely drubbing at the next general election, Labour is pretending to have ‘rediscovered its roots’.

Unfortunately this phoney recreation of class envy is about as close to class politics as we are likely to see. Class politics is not the politics of envy, the point of a working class analysis of society wasn’t to mouth off enviously about the well-off, it was for the vast majority of people to come together and transform society in the common interest of us all – even toffs.

The most significant thing about the political left today is its absence. Having spent over a decade foretelling economic collapse it had nothing to say when the markets actually did crash. By the time the job losses hit, the working class showed it was capable of self-organisation, leaving the tired old left choking in its political dust. (7)

More sickening than the contemporary left’s inability to even develop reasonable economic theory, though, is the absurd spectacle of Labour and the union bureaucracies – in Ireland as in Britain – attempting to win votes by suddenly discovering that society suffers from social and economic stratification.

The transformation of Gordon Brown into a fearless class warrior is not just unlikely, it’s laughable. Almost as funny, in fact, as the idea that Eamon Gilmore is the leader of a workers’ party. The only class war either of these austerity-mongers will lead is a top-down one on ordinary people.

(1) See Mick Hume’s introduction to the 1996 Pluto Press edition of the Communist Manifesto.
(2) Gordon Brown targets Tory ‘toffs’ in class war election campaign, James Chapman, December 3, 2009
(3) See: ianbone.wordpress.com
(4) Time for Labour to declare class war, Peter Lazenby, the Guardian, December 4, 2009
(5) Left out, Jason Walsh, forth, August 3, 2009
(6) Concern about poverty does nothing to address real economic need, Jason Walsh, forth, November 12, 2009
(7) European workers rebel as G-20 looms, Jason Walsh, CS Monitor, April 1, 2009